Dean Esmay wrote:
> However, I find it just as inconveivable that there would be much
> adaptation to any food which requires lengthy or complex cooking
> procedures.  The cooking your average cro magnon or neanderthal would have
> done would largely have consisted of what you could jam onto a stick and
> hold over a fire, or cook with hot rocks, or wrap in an animal's stomach
> and roast over a fire.

Hm, clearly no cro magnon is going to do any technologically
sophisticated
cooking, but I notice that when most people cook, they are continually
making small modifications in the recipe/preparation in order to produce
a tastier item. I would characterize this as a very simple and natural
sort of experimentation, yet after 15 or 20 trials with the same recipe,
you might end up with a behavioral chain of fairly impressive
sophistication. Since paleopeople were presumably our equals in
intelligence, if not erudition, do you think that they might have had
similar cooking experiences?

Toby